Build Start Time

[asarkar]

Believe it or not, Gradle has never been able to tell precisely when the build started 😒.

APIs BuildListener.buildStarted and Gradle.buildStarted have been deprecated
These methods currently do not work as expected since the callbacks will never be called after the build has started.

This got worse with the introduction of Configuration Cache in Gradle 6.6, which made it illegal to use a BuildListener 😖. Previously, the build-time-tracker plugin used one of the BuildListener methods for an approximation of build started.

Plugins and build scripts must not register any build listeners. That is listeners registered at configuration time that get notified at execution time. For example a BuildListener or a TaskExecutionListener.

To their credit, Gradle has improved the Configuration Cache documentation, but it really seems that this feature was introduced without much impact analysis and migration guidance for plugin authors. 👎

gradle/gradle#18520

Thus, beginning with version 4.3.0, ⭐build-time-tracker no longer includes the time taken for the configuration phase⭐, and uses the oldest task start time as the build start time. In a way, this makes sense, because of the following reasons:

1. Most of the users are interested in knowing which tasks took longer to run, not how long the configuration phase took.
2. If using Configuration Cache, the configuration phase runs only once and hence the time taken is even less important.

If you've a comment or concern, please comment below. Also consider upvoting the issue above ☝️

---

Here's an example of using Configuration Cache and the tasks sorted in descending order of time taken:

import java.lang.Thread
import java.time.Duration
import com.asarkar.gradle.buildtimetracker.Sort
import java.time.LocalDateTime

plugins {
    id("com.asarkar.gradle.build-time-tracker")
}

tasks.register("a") {
    doLast {
        println("a sleep " + LocalDateTime.now())
        Thread.sleep(1100)
        println("a awake " + LocalDateTime.now())
        println("Hello, World!")
    }
}
tasks.register("b") {
    doLast {
        println("b sleep " + LocalDateTime.now())
        Thread.sleep(2100)
        println("b awake " + LocalDateTime.now())
        println("Hi there!")
    }
}
buildTimeTracker {
    minTaskDuration.set(Duration.ofMillis(100))
    sortBy.set(Sort.DESC)
}

Execution 1:

a sleep 2022-05-05T00:05:10.004587
a awake 2022-05-05T00:05:11.110470
Hello, World!
b sleep 2022-05-05T00:05:11.122668
b awake 2022-05-05T00:05:13.228216
Hi there!
== Build time summary ==
:b | 2S | 67% | ██
:a | 1S | 33% | █

Build duration is 3 seconds.

Execution 2:

b sleep 2022-05-05T00:05:13.457265
a sleep 2022-05-05T00:05:13.457230
a awake 2022-05-05T00:05:14.558365
Hello, World!
b awake 2022-05-05T00:05:15.562509
Hi there!
== Build time summary ==
:b | 2S | 100% | ██
:a | 1S |  50% | █

Build duration is 2, not 3, seconds. This is because with Configuration Cache enabled, all tasks run in parallel by default.